N’uff for the credits (we thank CBS for posting the pics and article), now for our bit:

Most of us that have giving ideas to SWB or written the rant, smack, and whining we put into words in this blog have also worked many years with events and other goings on in Pittsburgh (city and surrounding) and we’ve dealt with the safety harassment of the city’s demands on fire retardant ratings for anything during those events.

Basically that means when something started burning it has to stop after so many seconds or minute (I don’t remember all the direct specs).

BTW …. by harassment, I mean having your event shut down or delayed … having artists break their tents down until they can get a fire retardant tent or you can provide one, etc, etc.

Which makes SWB ask the question —– how did this even happen???

IF the city pushed and harassed those bridge contractors as they do the common folk running events within the city limits, that fire should have put itself out minutes after it started with NO damage or safety threats to anyone.

In other words, this should have never happened ….. but as we can see the same tarps are the ones still covering the work areas on the bridge – lovely.

It’s great the contractor or paying $200k plus per day along with the damages to the bridge on top of that … but it’s not like the people that are actually inconvenienced are getting free gas or wear and tear money from the contractor – but I’m sure if those same inconvenienced people decide to work at or host an event in Pittsburgh they will confronted with the fire retardant safety demands of the city … unlike the contractors working on it’s critical infrastructure.

So … the first SWB Clueless award goes to both the Liberty Bridge contractors along with the city itself (sorry, it was too much of a tie to give either one total credit for that level of stupidity considering many lives could have actually been lost).

Alrighty, then ….. for all those loving to jump to conclusions, this article isn’t about making lifestyle choices or anything of the such.

Sorry to disappoint y’all … so ya can jump back from whatever conclusion you landed on (or skip reading this post and pop in your “Office Space” VHS tape .. which will probably be more entertaining).

Anywayz (we’re adding “z’s” to then end of lots of words to appeal more the Millennial generation) :-),

The pic is the view of the new Crazy Mocha store in Sewickley, PA. Now, for a SWB article, does this have a point at all?

Yep.

The blog, when it was on Apple’s web hosting site (yeeeeaaaarrrrs ago) was started with it’s first post in April of 2006 and the posts for years after being written at the Crazy Mocha in Southside when the company had a few stores to speak of. At least two other national blogs and twenty to thirty long time running local blogs were started that year in that Crazy Mocha location.

Now, the newest gem of the store chain – the relocated site in Sewickley PA site has opened for it’s first day with the chain now having way over 30 stores in multiple states (not bad for a local Pittsburgh company, right?)

In honor of Crazy Mocha providing such a beautiful new store, SWB thought it might be a good time to re-kick Screaming Weasel (not to mention with some inspiration from the latest literal bridge burning of the Liberty Bridge).

Check out the new store if you get a chance – even if you don’t live in the area … it is well worth the stop in to another location to celebrate and support a local company.

If you can’t get out to Sewickley – stop at another Crazy Mocha and tell them you saw the post!

Click Pic for link. SWB has spent years in The Strip, especially liking Wholey’s seafood. So when Luke decided to open his own seafood spot, we figured it would be hot.

Placed in the old Area 51 spot across from Reyna foods, the space is simple, slightly rustic yet elegant, and very, very, very tasty. We are convinced that no one does seafood like Luke.

When we went, we treated ourselves to the grilled swordfish. Personally, I have never experienced swordfish as well prepared and moist as I had at Luke’s. The service by all staff (including Luke himself) was excellent. The drinks were heaven. The atmosphere overall with the food quality made a very long day end quite nicely due to Luke’s Grille.

We highly recommend you visit and support this sure to be future Pittsburgh mainstay.

Slightly after our little stint of “help” from the folks at Sophisticated Pittsburgh on upping our number of blog writers, they in fact lost many of theirs. In other words people got real jobs, go married, or just disappeared of the face of the earth at SP. As a result, we are coming back to our original self.

So, about our original self. The blog experimentally started in 2005, and was moved to .mac via the Apple iWeb. We started writing around the time that PittGirl, CafeWitness, and others started and gained one of the top growing blog rankings ending up with 2000 readers per day, across 15 countries while on the .mac site.

That actually scared us, considering the amount of vomit we spewed out in those days along with the other rant blogs. I’m not sure we’ll be as harsh these days, but we’ll try.

BTW – while we were hosting on .mac, Apple kindly asked us to move our site due to their product not being originally made for the amount of throughput we were getting.

So, around Spring of 2008 we moved to WordPress.

The Weasel is back, and we will be blowing word chunks as far as possible.

“Forget history and you guarantee it will happen again” … I hated my high school history teacher because he made a vow to fail us all (not a challenge, mind you, an actual vow) … but the above was his favorite quote, and it’s the one critical piece of life that I learned from him. Unfortunately our country and our government is proving that taking on this attitude about history is really one of the keys to sustainability and survival.

The situation that lead to the current financial crater that is wall street can be blamed on ignoring the “forget history and you will guarantee it will happen again” advice. Our current situation is eerily similar to one not too long ago … the plight of the steelworker. You had two groups, both hard working, strong, and carrying large egos. Neither would give in, neither would compromise … both had a fight until the end attitude. Some say that represents honor. Some say that represents stupidity.

The end result was many losing homes, life long possessions, families, and what defined them as a human …. the steel industry. A few mentioned over the years that it wasn’t that compromise would not happen that made the steel industry fade away as we know it, but how long it took to get to a point where compromise could or would happen. By the time it progressed to the point of possible compromise, other countries took advantage of the opportunity to wedge into the steel industry, and quickly separated the bulk of the US steel mills from it.

It’s not that our financial situation as a country cannot be fixed, it’s that the egos of the politicians took so long to get to any kind of initial compromise that sever damage was done, leading way to loss of everything for those just hanging on, and loss of part of what defines us as a country. So the question is, are our politicians going to wait long enough that our country going into sheriff’s sale and gets divvied up by the other entities of the world … or will they actually defend us, instead of their egos, and restore America where the dream of raising a family is possible?

Few people realize, much of wall street is now owned by outside investors, so defending American is really not in it’s top interested …….. making the bottom line, or at least cutting losses for it’s foreign investors is. Main Street is no longer in a position to be helped by Wall Street, because we have some of the same interests … the only protection we can gain at the wall street level is from our politicians having enough pride in their country to protect it’s residents … but it seems that if they win and are rewarded with the right to say “I was right!” it’s OK if the American Dream is reduced to finding a better dumpster to dive into for dinner tonight.

First … to consumers, this is a credit/debit card alert (and most likely you’ll hear it from us WAY before hearing it from Dollar Bank or Master Card): MasterCard caught a processor possibly fraudulently charging to customer accounts, so cards were shut off and/or canceled.

Now on to the rant. After standing in a store having my card twice declined as a debit, and then declined as a credit, I called the number on the card to see what was going on. They informed me there was a card security issues and my card was shut off and canceled. When I asked who was the “offender” I was told that MasterCard does not inform Dollar Bank.

Now, I have online banking with alerts set to go to email ….. never received anything and was told by customer service that only if I had happened to log on to http://www.dollarbank.com would I have seen an alert. Now keep in mind we left PNC for multiple reasons, one being that we felt they used bailout money to drive National City down to acquire them – which in our eyes was illegal.

…but…

When something happens on your account with PNC and previously with National City, you knew via email immediately (or within minutes) what was going on. Not specifics, mind you, but general info … ie. “your card was shut off due to security issues, call customer service for more info.”. Neither National City dropped the ball on their customers by not informing them especially if they had elected to be informed with their account alerts via email.

So … basically still being clueless because I don’t know what vendor I am dealing with that was trying to post fraudulent charges to accounts associated with my bank, by no fault of my own after I get my new card I will be forced to link that card or use that card with a vendor that was known to process fraudulent charges. The best security is to immediately inform and keep your customers informed. Dollar Bank and MasterCard both dropped the ball on that by keeping their customers in the dark.

So, we elect to give a clueless trophy to Dollar Bank for being back around the early 90s in technology that keeps their customers in the dark, and to instantly going from what we thought was the better bank in Pittsburgh to what in our opinion is now close to being a joke.

We also give MasterCard a trophy for making sure their customers are in the dark so as the thieves of the world can take their pickings.

-SWB

PS – When we had National City / Visa combo as our banking … no issues. Dollar Bank / MasterCard … issues. BE AWARE.

Well, this was a hard one (no pun intended ….. and if you thought it was, get your head out of the gutter!). We had a difficult (better choice of word here) time figuring where to put this. Should it be under Rants? Should it be under Clueless Awards? Not sure …. hmmmm. Finally we decided on “So Stupid it could happen”.

Are we going to get on Mr. Weiner (click here to read the related USA Today article if you are clueless on Mr. W) on his apparent bad choices in lack of appropriate coverage? Nope …… got enough tabloids doing that (and they’re all thanking Anthony for providing the photos they don’t have to take hours photo-shopping). So what are we going to do, you ask with a confused smirk on your face?

Get to the root cause, as SWB loves to do (we said we were going to clean up the blog a bit when Sophisticated Pittsburgh took it over, but we didn’t agree to look the other way when someone places a six-foot diameter lit up neon bulls eye on their own head).

The polititio’s (new word created by SWB this second … we’ll trade you for a BMW for the rights to the word once it gets popular), have been quiet around the world except for standard stuff … so we’ve been quiet. But …………. courtesy of Mr. Weiner (my wife giggles every time she’s hears his name …), we now have a reason to write.

Well, Mr. W (or whatever you are calling him now) made a mistake many are making. That’s right, he’s human and made a mistake. Unfortunately he didn’t have the common sense to realize that he’s under the view of a 3000 watt spot light at all times. See …. we’re getting to a root cause of the problem, or at least a secondary root cause at this point … common sense.

Why is common sense only the secondary root cause to the problem of Mr. W having none of it to use while texting semi birthday suit pics on himself to someone other than his wife? Weight … lots of it. The problem with weight is its controlled by gravity. The only thing that keeps the weight of common sense from crashing to the ground and turning into a pool of single-celled useless sludge is a spine (of as us Americans like to call it … backbone).

A spine …. it’s that thing that keeps your body from collapsing to the ground. Backbone … it’s that thing that keeps you life from crashing to the ground due to mistakes you make in life because they are corrected or contained by the common sense that the backbone holds up.

Where is one place we get that backbone? School. Yup. Early on in life many things started to build up our backbone, and one of then was our experiences in school. You made mistakes in school, whether it be to slander another and have to pay for it later. You may have been made fun of and reacted in a bad way. You may have done something inappropriate (which is the PC word for “you did something some parent of some kid didn’t like and complained about). But …… you handled it, you learned from it, you build up a backbone from it, because those adults in charge around you guided you – but didn’t handle it for you. You learned how to treat those around you with respect and courtesy and began to learn what was right to do and what was wrong to do by trial and error. That’s how a backbone gets built. Nobody can build it for you … it has to be left to form by itself with guidance. Forming a good solid backbone is not always meant to feel good.

So where is this going?

We may be wrong, but we’re going to say that Mr W is the product of one of those schools where students are meant to “feel good about themselves all the time” and every issue is handled by the adults in charge to make sure that the students know how to act appropriately and not make and other student not feel bad. Yep … the “if Johnny goes home crying for one day, he’s going to be scared for life” attitude.

Great idea, but when a backbone is not allowed to develop because any learning via the normal “pain, hurt, and general unpleasentries of the world” is removed, a backbone will not be built, and if by chance it does get built, it will have so many holes in it the result will be eventual collapse. The collapse of a backbone leads to the definite collapse of a spine.

Where is this going? Well, if Mr. W had built up a better backbone early on in life, maybe he wouldn’t be bringing such shame to his family, spouse, political party, and adding to the shame of the country he is representing.

Our country a great one, not just because of the freedom, but because of the unique peoples it creates via the being the melting pot of the world. You get the development of top-notch technology, top-notch health care and more because of this. Unfortunately many are beginning to see low-life politicians leading to the view of this country by others are a land now void of backbone … what people know and recognize as what built America, and one of the few things that can sustain it.

“So Stupid It Could Happen” is not the fact that Mr Weiner was dumb enough to do what he did, but the fact that people like him with a lacking of common sense to correct or contain the mistakes they make (in his case, the lack of ability to “Man Up” and deal with your mistakes before getting pushed into the corner and forced to do it).

Do we thinks that Mr. W is correct is apologizing and staying in his position so he can now try to build up a backbone? Yes … second chances are necessary to build up character and even a backbone. We’ll see where it goes.

Take a look at Mr. Weiner and you get an in your face welcome to the what is most likely the product of the now in fruition product of America’s new “feel good” education.

Copyright

All works copyright 2000 - 2010 Lawrence A Capozzolo unless otherwise stated. Offenders will be forced to wash my car and clean up after my dogs.
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